The Scientification of Love

Rating:
Summary: A book that will change the way you look at love &birthing
Review: The Scientification of Love is a book that looks at the very core of our love and our relationships. Dr. Odent research looks at love and birth as a continuum of our sexual life. He explores the role of oxytocin - " the love hormone" in labor, birth and breastfeeding, as well as, oxytocin's role in the maternal-infant attachment process that forms the basis for all our relationships in life. I started to read this book early one morning and couldn't put it down. It's thought provoking ideas have stayed with me since. When we can incorporate Dr. Odent's research and ideas we will bring about a change that will include; undisturbed birthing, bonding and a peaceful society.

I highly recommend this book for anyone planning or expecting a child as well as childbirth educators, doulas, midwives and physicians. Anyone that would like to help create peaceful birthing and thus a peaceful society will enjoy Dr. Odent's work.

Rating:
Summary: oxytocin writ large for more loving humans
Review: Under a deceptively simple and small format, this is perhaps the most sophisticated and far-ranging of all Michel Odent's books until now. It brings together Michel's clinical experience of uninterfered human birth with his more recent research on the links between 'primal' experiences - before birth, around birth and in the first year-, and well being later on in life, with thought-provoking insights in every single chapter. While some readers may already be aware of the importance of oxytocin, the 'hormone of love', and endorphins in all apsects of human sexuality including lactation, the book explores their role in a wider concept of love that encompasses maternal love as prototype of all love and mystical emotions in altered states of consciousness. A very wide range of evidence from the biological and other sciences as well as the humanities is brought together in a logical sequence of chapters followed by both a summary of each argument and a list of references. The cross-section of scientific papers included is impressive and keeps the reader on track to catch a glimpse of the whole, the 'unbroken mirror' of human behaviour. From a review of studies of oxytocin receptors in and outside the brain to the relevance of the disputed 'aquatic ape theory' and the salience of comparable features in the births of Buddha and Jesus, there is a concordance which specialist readers should remain open to. The argument is anything but a reductionist one; the more extensive our analysis of the molecular level, -the'scientification' of love-, the greater our understanding of how malleable the hormonal balance of humans as social beings can be.

For a long time, Michel Odent has been interested in culture from the perspective of birth and the handling of infants around the time of birth. One of the main hypotheses in this book, -quite a large piece of the mirror-, is that interference with the birth process can be linked historically with a long phase of human evolution in which aggressiveness was adaptive; yet 'homo ecologicus' has everything to gain from a full dose of love hormones at the start of life. As an anthropologist who has witnessed in her lifetime the undisturbed birthing of Amazonian forest people, then the havoc caused by enforced medicalisation and now the conscious but difficult revaluing of native ways, I endorse Michel's argument as the mnessage it also is. His book is an optimist one. It absolutely relies on reason and knowledge to expose how the physiological reduction of neocortical control during labour, -only possible if mothers are secure-, does not only facilitate the release and action of oxytocin during birth but also provides a starting point for harnessing the energies of love heralded by Teilhard de Chardin, in new cultural forms.

Rating:
Summary: oxytocin writ large for more loving humans
Review: Under a deceptively simple and small format, this is perhaps the most sophisticated and far-ranging of all Michel Odent's books until now. It brings together Michel's clinical experience of uninterfered human birth with his more recent research on the links between 'primal' experiences - before birth, around birth and in the first year-, and well being later on in life, with thought-provoking insights in every single chapter. While some readers may already be aware of the importance of oxytocin, the 'hormone of love', and endorphins in all apsects of human sexuality including lactation, the book explores their role in a wider concept of love that encompasses maternal love as prototype of all love and mystical emotions in altered states of consciousness. A very wide range of evidence from the biological and other sciences as well as the humanities is brought together in a logical sequence of chapters followed by both a summary of each argument and a list of references. The cross-section of scientific papers included is impressive and keeps the reader on track to catch a glimpse of the whole, the 'unbroken mirror' of human behaviour. From a review of studies of oxytocin receptors in and outside the brain to the relevance of the disputed 'aquatic ape theory' and the salience of comparable features in the births of Buddha and Jesus, there is a concordance which specialist readers should remain open to. The argument is anything but a reductionist one; the more extensive our analysis of the molecular level, -the'scientification' of love-, the greater our understanding of how malleable the hormonal balance of humans as social beings can be.

For a long time, Michel Odent has been interested in culture from the perspective of birth and the handling of infants around the time of birth. One of the main hypotheses in this book, -quite a large piece of the mirror-, is that interference with the birth process can be linked historically with a long phase of human evolution in which aggressiveness was adaptive; yet 'homo ecologicus' has everything to gain from a full dose of love hormones at the start of life. As an anthropologist who has witnessed in her lifetime the undisturbed birthing of Amazonian forest people, then the havoc caused by enforced medicalisation and now the conscious but difficult revaluing of native ways, I endorse Michel's argument as the mnessage it also is. His book is an optimist one. It absolutely relies on reason and knowledge to expose how the physiological reduction of neocortical control during labour, -only possible if mothers are secure-, does not only facilitate the release and action of oxytocin during birth but also provides a starting point for harnessing the energies of love heralded by Teilhard de Chardin, in new cultural forms.